Minecraft AR scanner will let you import real life objects into Notch's blockdom

Pity these people, who could have merely photographed the real life Enterprise and had it appear in Minecraft as is. Same goes for this numpty, who built Planet Earth from scratch rather than capture its dimensions from a really high-up plane or something. They both could have saved themselves all of that wilful creativity and months of pride by simply scanning real-world objects and converting them into blocks using iThing app DekkoScan.

DekkoScan currently exists only in App Store approval limbo, awaiting the gaze of Apple's great, swivelling eye. Its creators built a 3D reconstruction system for an augmented reality car game earlier this year, and decided to co-opt the tech in the name of Notch.

“We thought it'd be cool to use that to export to other things, like Minecraft. So I built it, submitted it to the appstore today and, heh, now I can only wait for the approval from Apple,” said portemantho on the Minecraft subreddit. “I'd love to hear if people here would use it, and what features they'd like to find in there.”

The app is limited in the size of the objects it can scan by the low memory capabilities of iOS. It can muster a resolution of 128x128 on devices with an A5 chip or better - but you'll need an iPad 2, iPad Mini, iPhone4S or more recent iteration to run it.

For best results when scanning larger objects, users will want to stand further away. Um.

“So it's possible to scan a house in low resolution if you start from afar, but it doesn't work as well because the tech is pretty experimental and right now geared towards close-range scanning.”

By default, objects will be recreated in-game using the 16 available shades of wool, but Dekko are confident they can expand to include “the whole set” of block types.

Funnily enough, there’s already an app named Minecraft Reality which does the exact opposite - that is, plant Minecraft creations in real world locations using AR. Have any of you lot played around with that?

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